you're on my heart
by The Last Letter
Summary: and just like a tattoo, i'll always have you


_ My mom said she'd kill me if I ever got a tattoo_

The day after Jumaji part two, they go to a tattoo shop and they put one line on their wrists. Thick, black, and a reminder that this is it, that chances are worth taking. Alex goes too; he says he doesn't know how he will explain it to his wife but that it's important to him to. He knows not to waste it. _They _know not to waste it. This is the real world; there are no back-ups and there is no falling from the sky to restart.

Spencer keeps running his thumb over it when he goes back to New York, when Martha goes back to school and Fridge goes back to school and Bethany returns to her travels and Alex goes back to his children. It's just him, on these busy streets where it feels like he's about to crack. Except that it's not. There is the groupchat. There are his people. And he goes, every chance he gets, to visit Martha and see her friends and watch her blossom in her happiness. And he isn't jealous and he isn't insecure. Because he's welcomed into her fold too. Her friends are his friends and her friends give him the power to do more than stutter a few words to the classmates surrounding him. He makes his own friends. He graduates. He proposes. Martha says yes.

There is one life to live and Spencer is living his.

Fridge was meant to be an athlete. He's built for running and fields, for weight-lifting and strength. He knows that he could get injured – it happens to more athletes than the ones who make it to the pros – but he's determined. It won't be him. It can't be him. He is himself when he's on this field; he's proud of himself on this field and he knows his Mom is proud of him too. But, there's this voice in the back of his head. Athlete isn't forever. And he has this thick black mark on the inside of his wrist to remind him that there is no forever. There is now. There is this life. He doesn't like to think of Jumanji but it's in the back of his mind when he signs up for his first Zoology course. He gets drafted to the pros; he gets a degree. Five years in, when his knee blows, he's not as heartbroken as he once thought he would be. He goes to work on a nature reserve. Mom is proud. He is proud.

Fridge has one life to live and he's living it.

Martha stopped feeling ugly the second that Bethany lifted her up. It's not even all about the mirror but about the way that her nerdiness made her feel. She used to wear it like a shield. This is who I am and this is all I am. She found with Bethany shining her beaming lights on her, Martha also embraced it. Nerdiness wasn't _all _that she could be but it's what she wants to be. It's who she really is. She doesn't need to be Ruby Roundhouse – and she doesn't want to dress like Ruby Roundhouse _ever _– to love herself. To walk tall and confidently through her life. But in the worst moment of her life, it's Ruby Roundhouse's strength that she thinks of. She and Spencer have a baby, the first little baby that they tried so hard for, that she carries when she's thirty-six. The little baby who was born too early and who Martha sits in a hospital room without, Spencer's arms around her, their daughter in the arms of doctors who are operating on her deformed heart. Martha looks at her tattoo and Spencer's tattoo instead of looking at his worry and feeling her own. This is one life. If this is their daughter's life, at least she spent every second of it loved and wanted. It's a small consolation – a pitiful one, really – and Martha breaks down in tears when their healthy, tiny daughter is returned to her arms.

There is one life and Martha knows the greatest gift is getting to live it.

Bethany used to envision herself as the girl who would get married. She would have pretty babies with her pretty husband and host dinner parties. She would have a shoe collection and designer gowns and, probably, a nanny. Or two. One for each pretty baby. It wasn't what happened. Bethany wasn't ever the type of woman who thought that she would – or even could – change the world. One of many, with a pretty face that she knew how to use. That was supposed to be it. Until she is standing in front of world leaders, cameras trained on her face, and she is talking about the preservation of the world they live in, the important of every culture that exists in it, and though she is a white woman who grew up in the lap of luxury, this is what she can do. This is how she can help. She has a voice here, one that people who ignore the voices of people whose skin is a different colour or whose backgrounds are different will listen to. This is how she can wield her power, and she does it well. She doesn't age as gracefully as she dreamt she would – by the time she turns forty-five, she has crow's feet that would horrify her sixteen year old self and her hands are work calloused. But, it's the thing that she loves the most: the physical work of it all, the distributing medicine, building homes, and meeting the people she's living to help to learn how they live and what they need, instead of what she thinks they need. Every now and then, as she looks at the sun-faded but still black line across her arm, she smiles and thinks that this is how it was always meant to be.

She has one life line and this is how she's happiest living it.

Alex remembered. He remembered how the never-ending nightmare of Jumanji seemed to only last a few months. He remembered what it felt like when he was told that it had been _years_. The soul-crushing agony, looking into the avatar faces of Bravestone and Mouse and the realization that _Bethany_, the fun-loving, flirtatious, not like anyone he'd met in his real life as a music-loving underground nerd, was years his junior. If the game had never stolen him, he could have been her father. But it did. And she loved him and he loved her, in some way that he could have never defined to anyone else; It was her that he remembered when his first-born was a daughter. The team meant a lot to him and he would have been there for any of them, if they needed an adult or any guidance that he could help them with, but it was Bethany that he told his wife about, on their very first date together. A pretty blonde girl who had saved his life when he was a teenager. His wife had wanted to meet her and thank her but it was only 2010 and Bethany was still just a little girl. He let her grow up and he grew up, holding Bethany and Andy in his arms, falling asleep with his wife, and not thinking of Jumanji at all, except for every day. Days of green and the countdown, the countdown to that very last life – the one that mattered. The one where there was no _Freak House_ but just the Vreeke house, where his father loved him and raised him and he never had another day of teenage angst – not even when his father complained about his rock cassettes. It was a house of Christmas lights, where his Jumanji gang could find him for refuge, and a safe place for Alex to bring his children to play.

It was the life that mattered, and the day that Alex Vreeke was put in the ground, he knew that he lived it well.

**A watch of **_**The Next Level**_**, a rewatch of **_**Welcome To The Jungle**_**, and some red wine and here we are!**

**~TLL~**


End file.
